Take a look at the accompanying map and you can’t but notice the extent of overlap between India’s thickly forested areas, the regions with the bulk of the country’s most important mineral wealth and the territory over which Maoists are dominant. Is this just a coincidence? No, that would stretch credulity. So what connects the Maoist menace with forests and mining? Clearly, forests give a guerilla force its best chance...

The word ‘Mitanin’ was derived from a Chhattisgarhi custom, where a ‘mitanin’ is a girl bonded ceremoniously in her childhood to another girl as a lifelong friend IT IS quite common for tractors in rural India to haul all kinds of unusual cargo. Even then, a late night emergency shuttle, from a small home in Narayanpaal village in the backward Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, to ferry a pregnant woman in...

Posco, the world's fourth largest steel maker, was in January ranked among a global list of 100 companies that will last for the next 100 years. Interestingly, governance, transparency and capacity to handle environment-related issues are taken into account in selecting these 100 companies "Posco will not only last the next 100 years, but will go beyond, and India will play a big part in our story of survival and growth", CK...

"India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously." Arundhati Roy Controversies, protests and violence have marred land acquisition for projects in India. Protests against acquiring agricultural land, inappropriate compensation or environmental impact have been the main reasons for these protests. In most cases, the protests are by farmers who are hardly compensated after their fertile agricultural land is taken over in for...

Even as the Orissa government attempts to use force to secure the `Posco area', serious discrepancies have emerged in the submissions made by the state government to the Centre in order to secure the forest clearance for the project. The state government had claimed that the three villages involved had not filed any claims over the forest land under the Forest Rights Act. But TOI has got access to the...